THE REBELLION THEY DIDN'T COUNT ON
Communities are blocking billions in AI data center projects from coast to coast, and in Virginia, the resistance just made it all the way to the Supreme Court.
Missed Part 1? Here it is in one paragraph.
Americans paid $400 to $500 billion for fiber internet that was never built. The fee is still on your bill. AT&T is cutting copper by 2029 and handing rural customers a 5G pole antenna instead. Wall Street is now earning returns from your monthly broadband bill.
SOUNDING THE HORN: THE CONDUCTOR’S BRIEF: (A fast, clear summary of the key takeaways to keep you informed on the go)
The Promise: Tech giants and their financiers sold towns on jobs, tax revenue, and progress in exchange for hosting sprawling AI data centers.
The Awakening: From Memphis to El Paso, residents now understand the tradeoff, depleted aquifers, higher power bills, and suffocating heat. Communities are saying no.
Wall Street’s Worry: A Morgan Stanley managing director admits the easy builds are done. Resistance is forcing a “realignment of expectations” as trillions in bets stall.
The Local Heat Effect: A University of Cambridge study analyzed 6,000 data centers worldwide: surrounding land temperatures rose by 3.6°F on average, up to 16.4°F in some cases, extending more than six miles beyond their property lines.
The Global Impact: 340 million people are already living in the thermal footprint of data centers. In Mexico, Spain, the U.S., the pattern is identical: new tech, new heat islands.
The Water & Power Drain: Two-thirds of data centers built since 2022 sit in water-stressed regions. Each one consumes power equal to 100,000 homes, often forcing utilities to reactivate fossil-fuel plants to keep up.
The Resistance Grows: In 2025, grassroots activism blocked or delayed 48 projects worth $156 billion. Virginia, Indiana, Texas, Louisiana, citizens fought back and won.
The Tactics That Work: Show up at zoning meetings. File FOIAs on secret NDAs. Connect with Data Center Watch and Food & Water Watch. Push the AI Data Center Moratorium Act.
The Persistence: Twelve Oak Valley homeowners kept the Prince William Digital Gateway fight alive through two court victories, and now the project is headed toward the Virginia Supreme Court.
The Bottom Line: The so-called “AI revolution” is built on heat, hype, and your stolen infrastructure. We paid for the digital future, and it’s time to take it back.
NOT IN MY BACKYARD
The communities that were promised jobs and economic growth in exchange for hosting these data centers are wising up, and they are saying no.
A Morgan Stanley managing director recently lamented to the New York Times that organized resistance is slowing new data center builds overall, placing real strain on investors who bet big on this market. In his words: “A lot of the commitments and the build-out of data centers where it’s easy has kind of been done, so you’re getting marginally more difficult.”
He described needing to “realign” market expectations because “it’s hard to put a couple trillion dollars in the ground in a short time.”
Andy Cvengros, a co-lead at data center advisory firm JLL, put it even more bluntly: “The people who are trying to block or protest these things are much more well educated than they were before.” He noted that projects backed by very reputable groups, offering $50, $60, even $100 million contributions to local communities, are still getting shut down.
Good.
From Memphis to El Paso to Louisiana to Wisconsin, residents are learning what their communities are actually being asked to sacrifice: depleted water supplies, spiking electricity bills, increased pollution, and infrastructure strain, and nobody asked them if it was worth it.
They are finding their answer: no.
And now, there’s a new piece of evidence to add to the fight.
THEY ARE LITERALLY HEATING YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD
A University of Cambridge research team recently published findings that should be placed in the hands of every city council member, every zoning commissioner, every state legislator in America.
Their study analyzed two decades of satellite temperature data mapped against the locations of more than 6,000 AI data centers worldwide. What they found is not abstract. It is measurable. It is global. And it is already affecting 340 million people.
Land surface temperatures surrounding data centers increased by an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit after each facility came online. In the most extreme cases, temperatures spiked by 16.4 degrees Fahrenheit. And here is what makes this even more alarming: the warming effect does not stop at the property line. Temperature increases were measured up to 6.2 miles away from the facilities.
This is not a localized anomaly. In Mexico’s Bajío region, now a major data center hub, researchers found unexplained temperature increases of 3.6 degrees over the past twenty years. The same pattern appeared in Aragon, Spain. The effect is consistent across continents, cultures, and climates.
We are not talking about minor fluctuations. We are talking about creating new heat islands in communities that are already living through a weather-volitle world, communities that were never asked for consent, never fully informed of the costs, and never given a meaningful voice.
Two-thirds of new data center facilities built since 2022 are located in water-stressed regions. A single modern AI facility can draw as much power as 100,000 homes. And when local grids can’t keep up, regions are sometimes forced to rely on older fossil fuel plants to prevent grid failures.
The infrastructure being built to power the future is poisoning the present.
THE FULL PICTURE
Let me put this together for you, because it matters that you see it whole.
As I covered in Part 1, thirty years ago, you paid for fiber internet that was never built. The money was collected. The promises were made. The regulations were lifted. The executives got rich.
Then the copper was cut, and you were handed a 5G antenna, while the fiber that should have been yours was rerouted to serve data centers.
Then Wall Street bundled those data centers and that fiber into securities and sold them to pension funds, earning returns from your monthly bill, while designating you as the riskiest, lowest-priority asset class.
And now, those same data centers, the ones built on infrastructure you paid for, financed with securities sold on your back, are warming your land, straining your water, taxing your grid, and doing it all without your consent.
This is not a series of unfortunate market failures. This is a system that was designed, through policy capture, regulatory indifference, and financial engineering, to extract maximum value from the American public while delivering as little as possible in return.
The good news, the only good news, is that people are waking up.
The more people learn about data centers, the more they resist them. Wall Street knows it. The tech executives know it. The Morgan Stanley managing directors know it. And they are worried.
What they are not counting on is how much we already know, and how much more we are going to find out.
We paid for the Information Superhighway. We never got it. Now they want to build a new tollway on the same land, heat the air above it, drain the water beneath it, and charge us again for the privilege.
I say: not this time.
SO WHAT TO DO WITH ALL OF THIS?
You fight. And here’s the thing…. people already are, and they are winning.
In 2025 alone, organized community resistance blocked or delayed 48 data center projects totaling over $156 billion in planned investment. In just the second quarter of 2025, $98 billion in projects were stopped, more than the entire total of all previous quarters combined. Amazon was forced to withdraw a 7.2 million square foot proposal in Louisa County, Virginia. A $400 million project in Fauquier County, Virginia was withdrawn entirely before it even reached a hearing. A court voided the rezoning for the massive Prince William Digital Gateway project.
The Prince William Digital Gateway fight just escalated further. The Virginia Court of Appeals has now sided with the lower court ruling that voided the rezoning… meaning the developers and county must now decide whether to take this fight all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court. What began as twelve Oak Valley homeowners filing a lawsuit has now survived two court victories and is forcing one of the most powerful data center projects in the world, 37 data centers on 2,100 acres next to Manassas National Battlefield, to face the highest court in the state. This is what staying power looks like.
In Indiana alone, over a dozen projects failed to get approved. Communities across Texas, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Michigan are showing up to public hearings, planting yard signs, launching petitions, and shutting these projects down, one zoning board at a time.
And it’s rattling Wall Street. Badly. These are not small wins.
Below, Denver neighbors fill council chambers beyond capacity:
Here is what’s working, and what you can do right now:
Show up to local government meetings. Zoning and planning commission meetings are where these projects live or die. Most data center proposals require rezoning, which means a public vote. That vote is your leverage. Find out what’s being proposed in your county. Most residents have no idea a project is coming until it’s too late. Don’t be one of them. Attend the meetings. Bring your neighbors.
I also recommend watching our recent “Financial Rebellion” on the steps you can take:
Demand transparency from your elected officials. Ask them directly through a Freedom of Information Request (FOIA):
Has a data center company approached our county? Have any nondisclosure agreements been signed? Who is negotiating on our behalf, and what are the terms? In 2023 and 2024, developers quietly acquired land and obtained approvals under cover of NDAs, deliberately obscuring their identities. That secrecy is a weapon. Sunlight is the antidote.
Call your representatives about the broadband betrayal. The $42.5 billion BEAD program meant to finally bring broadband to unserved communities is being strangled by the same fiber shortage that data centers created. Demand your representatives protect that program, and demand accountability for the $400–500 billion that was collected and never delivered.
Support the AI Data Center Moratorium Act. On March 25, 2026, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, legislation that would halt all new data center construction nationwide until strong federal safeguards are in place to protect workers, consumers, communities, and the environment. It is unlikely to pass in the current Congress. That does not make it irrelevant. It makes it a pressure point. Call your representatives. Tell them you support a moratorium. Tell them why. Every call, every letter, every constituent who shows up on record changes the political calculus.
Talk about it. Share this piece. Share the research. The data center industry spent years operating in deliberate obscurity, buying land quietly, filing under shell companies, signing NDAs with local officials, because they knew that awareness was their enemy. One organizer in Prince George’s County, Maryland put it plainly after her petition gathered 20,000 signatures: “The more we become aware of these projects, the more likely we are to stop them.”
That is the whole strategy. And it is working.
The broadband betrayal took thirty years and $500 billion because no one connected the dots while it was happening. The data center buildout is happening right now, in plain sight, at a speed and scale that dwarfs anything that came before it. The window to act is open.
The question is whether enough of us will walk through it.
If this piece resonated with you, share it. The truth about what was done to this country’s infrastructure doesn’t live in the mainstream press. It lives in communities like ours, passed hand to hand.
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The data centers, I believe, are kill boxes. Their fumes, vibrations, frequencies, inter alia, sounds and radiation will be slow poisoning everything in a certain radius around it. The people will vanish, nice and quiet like, from all sorts of illness. The lands will be free for the picking. Again, people underestimate the treachery of those evil ones. Good for those ones who fight back.
El Trumpo is gonna be pissed as his goal of 500 new data centers costing $5 trillion taxpayer dollars may be in jeopardy. I expect an executive order banning all state opposition to the build out of palantir run data centers for the use of digital IDS.